by Peter S. Oleson
Ketchikan was not a large town, but because it hugged the sides of the mountains
which comprise a large area of Southeast Alaska, it was a long town, long
and narrow. Many of the houses there were not directly accessible from a
street. These buildings were reached by using boardwalks. It seemed like
the steepest parts of town had the most of these walkways. The only real
hassle with this layout for someone without a car was the distance between
some of the places one had to get to. It was a long walk from one end of
town to the other. I know, I walked it many times. Especially in those first
few months there.
There were some customs about Ketchikan that I had never run into before.
If a person stepped off the sidewalk, all the traffic immediately stopped
to allow the pedestrian to cross the street. I didn't realize at first why
people did that. Also, the Fire Department was a volunteer organization,
and all along the main street of town there were sirens on the power poles.
When a fire alarm sounded, all the sirens went off and all traffic on the
main drag pulled over until the sirens quit, and it didn't matter which
way the trucks went from the stations. Everybody pulled over to let the
volunteers get to the station or to the fire, and they could be coming from
home or wherever they worked.
After Diane and I had lost our traveling cohorts, we were looking at October.
It started raining in October. We knew it rained a lot there, we did not
know that it rained all the time. We had arrived during an unusually long
high pressure spell during the month of September and the weather was gorgeous.
Walking was no longer as much fun in the rain. One soaking wet day it dawned
on me where the custom of stopping for pedestrians came from. It was purely
out of sympathy for the miserable bastards who were unfortunate enough to
be walking in the rain.
All news was not bad news, though. After repeated stops at any businesses
that might offer any hope of employment, I was finally hired by the local
VW dealership. I had never worked on a Volkswagen, but I did know that the
engines were in the rear of the vehicles. In fact, the only time I remembered
being in a VW was on a particularly ill fated evening in Wisconsin where,
during the course of one-eyed Brent's bachelor party, I was involved in
two motor vehicle accidents. The first being the roll-over of the VW Beetle,
in which I was a rear seated passenger. Five big drunken guys in an upside
down Bug is not a pretty sight, especially from the back seat. Later, not
wanting to be trapped in another rear seat situation, I opted to ride on
the back of El Lardo's flatbed truck. I managed to fall off the roof of
the truck somehow, at highway speed ( Don't ask, I was unconscious for a
while and all I know about the whole thing is hear-say). I woke up later
that night lying in the back of the truck alone outside the house I shared
with One-Eye and El Lardo, where they were continuing the party. I ended
up going to the hospital the next day because I hurt so bad I thought I
might score some pain-killers there. The nurse they gave me was a fellow
I knew from High School named John. He was always a nice fellow and he was
nice to me that day, too. I thought maybe a little too nice, the way he
bandaged my wounds and cluck-clucked me, he struck me as being somewhat
more effeminate than I remembered him. It was 10 years before I found out
that he wasn't John anymore, but Joan. I don't know where along that strange
shape-changing trail (s)he was that day at the hospital, but I hope (s)he's
happy with whatever it is (s)he is now. On top of that, I didn't get any
pain pills. However, I digress.
The service manager at the Shop was a nice young guy, older than me, of
course, named Jim. He was the person who actually hired me. The Shop was
built on pilings over Tongass Narrows and maybe a half mile from the shack.
Jim gave me a basic explanation of Volkswagens (this is the motor, the spark
plugs go here, now tune it up). So I began the series of daily walks to
work with my packed lunch to get the $4.50 an hour they paid new guys. I
had to read a lot of manuals in the evenings for a while. It turned out
that my job was to figure out the antique fuel injection that VW used back
then. Steve M, the senior mechanic was not smitten with fuel injection,
so I was the guppy they found to do that kind of stuff. I guess it turned
out OK, everybody eventually ended up using it, so I have a job still, working
on cars fuel and electrical systems.
I really needed a car, though. On particularly bad days I would hitch rides
to and from work. On just normally drizzly days, I would walk. On one of
those hitching days I got a ride from a freaky looking guy in a VW bus.
A 1965 panel model which he was making into a camper. We kind of hit it
off from the start, I thought, but we had a kind of a glitch that first
day. Steve C. had to make a stop on the way to wherever he was bound. While
I was sitting in the bus waiting, I noticed a pistol in a paper bag behind
the drivers seat, so I took it out and looked at it. I put it back it the
bag and stuck the bag back where I found it. I guess I stuck it a little
further back than I thought I did. When Steve C. came back and dropped me
off, he was driving away and reached back to check on his gun and didn't
feel the bag. He thought for a minute that I had stolen it.
Diane lucked out and landed a job at the local hospital. She was hired by
the personal director, Gary, who happened to be the best friend of Jim at
the Shop. Small towns are like that.
Dago had to stay home during the days alone. For a while, I made him stay
indoors, but as he became familiar with the neighborhood, I would let him
out for the day. He had a lot of trouble with the local big burly dogs.
When I would get home and find him nowhere about, I would have to walk around
the alley and find the car all the big dogs would be hanging around. Chances
were good that Dago would be under that car. The landlord's kids, from upstairs
kind of adopted Dago and he got along well with their dog, too. He got to
spend some of his day time upstairs with them when we were at work.
He wore out his welcome there one day, though. Apparently he took their
raw beef roast off the kitchen counter where it was thawing and drug it
down to our place to eat. That was when the upstairs kids found him, anyway.
One small stuffed black dog and one nearly devoured roast. He never got
free roam up there after that.
Neither of us was making a whole lot of money. We didn't have a television
or even a radio at the shack. We would walk around if the weather wasn't
too bad in the evenings. Most of the times we walked, we would end up at
the Public Library. We spent a lot of time reading that winter. Reading
and getting acquainted with people. Steve C. got a job working at the Shop
not long after I did. His mom Ann was very nice and their apartment was
kind of a gathering area for the local weirdo element in our age range.
I bought a cheap automotive 8-track at the local drug store. There were
no chain stores or fast food joints in town. All the businesses were local
businesses and they did a pretty good job of covering the spectrum of items
a person could conceivably use. The local commerce was focused pretty much
on the fishing industry, with lumber second and mining coming in a distant
third. I found a junk car battery in a wreck behind the Shop and made a
little wooden box to house it and the tape player. I only had one speaker,
so I mounted that in a cardboard box. A week or so later, we found an old
black and white television at the pawn shop down the road for $25. There
was only one channel and it didn't come in very good. There wasn't much
news on it though because all the shows had to come up from America on tape
and then were broadcast locally a week or two after they aired down below.
Pretty strange watching the news from two weeks ago. I think they flew up
the Super Bowl special, that ran only a week delayed. A lot of people didn't
listen to the radio for a week so they could get into the game.
It was about that time that we walked one weekend all the way to the southern
end of town. They had a music store there. They also had "Europe 72",
which I didn't know even existed. I had to have it. That evening I got good
and blasted and sat my cardboard speaker box on the floor, wired the second
channel into the television speaker and laid down with my head between them
and hit the play button.
I lost all track of where I was, I don't think I even opened my eyes except
when I had to switch tapes. What an incredible album. It's hard to describe
what I felt. Maybe hypnotized would be the closest I could come, maybe enchanted,
maybe entwined. As the last notes died away, I got jerked back to reality.
The landlord was playing "Running Bear" obviously in protest to
my overloud and distorted GD. In the mood I was in then, though, aliens
could have raped me and I wouldn't have cared. Looking back with the perspective
that I have now, that may have been the first time that I felt that the
Grateful Dead was somewhat more than the sum of it's parts; and that magically,
somehow I was a part of it.
Two things happened that first winter, though, that changed our lives forever.
The wonderful innocence we had brought to Alaska was violated, and the one
who violated it was I. We were scratching out a meager living there in Ketchikan,
things were getting better, and Diane came up pregnant. I blew it, I admit
it, I was concerned that people who lived in the black hole of an alley
and were merely subsisting could not in any way even consider the possibility
of progeny. No thank you, not for me, no way. What expecting mother could
hold someone with those sentiments dear? The inevitable rift occurred. Diane
was forced, by me, to apply to the proper state agency for an abortion.
Which the Great State of Alaska paid for, thank you very much. Those days,
those useless, egocentric, wasted days afterwards left us with no common
ground. And I reached out for ground to the people I knew and had known.
El Lardo came up to Alaska. This was the other of the two events, if you
were wondering. I am wondering what might have been. That was the second
being that I had a hand in killing.
El Lardo was the best friend I ever had. His father was the mayor of the
fair city where we were raised, and his basement, I dare say, was inviolate.
Tony and I were photography freaks. We had our darkroom down in the mayors
basement. Also, Tony lived in that basement when I would stay over there.
We had a third member of the group there in the cellar: Mike Z, son of the
local police chief. How safe a place could you find? Mike joined the Navy
and was destroyed in an incident involving the boiler of an aircraft carrier,
whatever that means.
Anyway, Tony came up to live with us. So much stuff happened in such a few
months back then that it's hard to remember what happened when. I know,
though, that as things became tighter between me and El Lardo, they became
much looser between me and Diane. The classic wife vs. Best friend syndrome.
(MS Word insists that that B in best be capitalized, after three attempts
to lower case it. Who am I to argue with Billy G.?). Where was my train
of thought?
We moved out of Hopkins Alley shortly after El Lardo showed up. We moved
south of town to another shack. We rented it from a guy we called Gorgeous
George. He was a former janitor at the local grade school, who had been
caught more than once humping the goal post at that school. In true government
fashion, he was allowed to serve out his time (school folks have an incredibly
strong union, don't they? I don't mind that it protects the good people,
but should it protect the questionable?) We had to go to George's house
to pay the rent, and naturally, I had to scope out his medicine cabinet:
after we were treated to his demonstration of his new microwave oven, and
we had eaten umpteen soft and hard boiled eggs, which he enjoyed cooking
in his new oven.
George's wife was even spookier than he was, and she had a prescription
for Thorazine and had, according to the instructions on the bottle, to take
one of them every three to four hours. It was a big bottle. It was an almost
full big bottle. When we left, it was a half full big bottle. Who there
would ever know the difference? We were downed out and pitifully drunken
for a long while after that. It helped dull the pain of Diane's leaving.
She left to live with her brother in Santa Anna down there in L. A..
The house we were living in there on Roosevelt Drive, became a mecca for
weirdos. The previous tenant was a totem carver named Nathan, who would
show up on nights when Steve C. and his band would show up to practice.
Some nights nobody would show up, the drum set was always taking up most
of the living room, and El Lardo and I would try to play music. We should
have stuck to singing harmony, as we were not bad at that, but all that
equipment sitting there was so inviting
It was during that time that El Lardo told me that I would be leaving soon
to retrieve my one and only, my lost love, Diane. He was right, but in the
interim, strange stuff was happening. I met Milo. He came to work at the
Shop. With him, Jack Bunch came into our little reality.
Milo and Jack lived in Milo's old step van. Trouble followed them like a
happy puppy. No sooner would we go into a bar than there Jack would be,
lying on the floor. He couldn't seem to keep his hands off of other peoples
women. Then the police would come, it all became so predictable, Jack goes
to jail, Milo freaks out, we put Milo to bed, I had to break that chain
of events.
I left Ketchikan, I left Jack and El Lardo, I went to retrieve my one and
only true love-Diane. While she was gone, I would go to this little phone
booth at the hospital every Friday night after I got paid, and I would plug
that stupid phone with quarters just to hear her voice. I loved her then
and I love her now.
Call me whatever you will, but isn't love the one thing we all seek and
follow?
I flew out of Ketchikan from an airline that took off of the water, when
we got to Metlakatla, the plane was about to land on the ground. I freaked
out and yelled to the pilot that there was no water under us. He laughed,
the pontoons had wheels.
I left Alaska, I vowed to return, as soon as I could, but I needed the woman
that I loved, and I would not be denied. I took Dago with me in a stupid
little wire cage that I built. I was airborne, and the summer would see
my return.
Peter S. Oleson
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